I’m Travis Reynolds, a pro dunker from North Carolina. On episode 54 of the Dunk Talk Podcast with Dylan Haugen, we broke down the freak injury that took my right hand away for seven weeks, and what I did with that time instead of sitting around. The show’s version is at why your off-hand is critical for dunking success. Here’s mine.
Getting the Black Band First
Some context from earlier that year: I earned the black band from The Dunk Camp, which means landing the full set of elite dunks in a single session. It took week after week of trying those dunks every session, finding the problem in one, tweaking my technique, and coming back. The most technical one for me was the 360 Behind the Back. The weirdest was the off-the-backboard Eastbay, because I never do backboard dunks.
Getting the band was cool, but the real prize was consistency. All of those dunks are engraved in my head now. The process taught me what to look for any time I’m trying to improve any dunk. That mattered a lot for what came next.
A Freak Injury on a Push-Off Dunk
The injury itself was honestly a freak thing. I was learning push-off dunks, and I had my guy standing too far away. Instead of dunking straight down, I had to throw the ball hard toward the back of the rim, and while it rattled around it snapped straight into my finger. Bent it backward, damaged the tissue, knocked the joint slightly out of position. Not technically a dislocation, but close enough to earn a splint.
Seven weeks. Splint on, finger straight, right hand basically useless. If you’re doing Dubble Ups, learn from me and put your guy closer than you think he needs to be.
Starting Over With My Left Hand
My goal stayed the same through the whole injury: be the best dunker I can be. Take my right hand away and the math is simple. That leaves my left. And the difference between my hands was embarrassing. With my right I had the black band. With my left I was struggling to make basic one-handers, purely from a lack of coordination.
I decided this needed to happen at some point in my career anyway. If I call myself a pro and an event comes up where my right hand is hurt, “I can’t dunk today” is not an acceptable answer. So I went all in on the left. Low rim almost every day. I even taught myself to shoot a basketball left-handed, because if I can’t control the ball at all with that hand, how am I supposed to learn dunks with it?
“Week one was ugly.”
Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54
That’s not false modesty. Jordan Kilganon was in town and got to watch me take five attempts to make a basic left-handed Windmill. When the best dunker alive is standing there watching you fumble one-handers, you find out real fast how honest your training has been.
How I Low-Rim for Real Transfer
The mistake I see with most low rim work is that people don’t recreate how the dunk actually feels in the air. The whole point is building muscle memory that transfers straight from the ground to the jump. So whatever the dunk is, I replicate the exact feeling. If I’m working a self-bounce Windmill, I bounce the ball, do the full arm swing, and grab it exactly like I would in the air. And I finish as hard as I possibly can. If you slow down at the rim to guide it in softly, you’re training a different dunk than the one you’ll attempt in a session.
For the left hand specifically, my main drill was throwing the ball off the backboard to myself like a slingshot and dunking it as hard as I could. My misses always came from losing control at the last second, so I trained staying on top of the ball and finishing. And I did the palming drills constantly, because being able to control the ball through the whole motion is what most dunks actually require.
“The ultimate rule is reps. Just do a million reps and do a million more reps.”
Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54
Week One vs Week Seven
By the end of the seven weeks, the left hand still wasn’t beautiful, but it was real. I hit my first lefty Eastbay in a session that felt like a genuine breakthrough. I punched a lefty Windmill straight down. The Scorpion took a couple of tries. I made serious progress on the reverse 360 Windmill, which is probably the best dunk I can do left-handed, and one I want to keep building even now that my right hand is back.
The difference between week one and week seven wasn’t talent showing up. It was the coordination finally feeling like mine. Dillan McCarthy jokes around by hanging off the rim by his elbow for a minute straight, and honestly the principle is the same one I used: expose the hand to the stress until the stress stops mattering. His story is wild in its own right, and Dylan covered it in the episode on his 50 inch vertical.
The Comeback Session
When the splint came off and I finally dunked right-handed again, I expected rust. Instead I warmed up with a 360 Windmill off a short approach that felt insane, tried a 360 Eastbay, and destroyed it on the second attempt. Off the dribble. By far my best 360 ever, in my first session back. Part of that is the weight I lost during the recovery, down about seven pounds to my strongest-ever power to weight ratio. Part of it is that the work never actually stopped.
If You’re Hurt Right Now
A lot of people message me worried that an injury means they’ll come back and not be themselves anymore. I’ve never seen it happen that way, not for me and not for the pros I know.
“The muscle memory is not going to go anywhere during your injury. The years that you have spent working on that muscle memory is not going to go away just because you got injured.”
Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #54
Find the thing you can still work on, work it like it matters, and come back better. That’s not a slogan, it’s literally what the seven weeks were. The longer version of how injuries shaped my whole career is in my dunk journey story, and the reason all of this got documented in the first place is in why all dunkers should make long-form content.
I’m @TravisDunks on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok if you want to see the left hand keep improving.
